Woodworking blog entries tagged with 'workbench'

I knew I’d come to this point – and I don’t mean throwing out pithy blog entry titles. I’d have to decide what kind of dog holes I want.
Jameel Abraham (Mr. Benchcrafted) feels pretty strongly that square dogs are the only way. Chris Schwarz used to be agnostic, but now has a strong preference for round dogs.
Lon Schleining suggests using both. Scott Landis doesn’t really state a preference in his book, but most of the benches he shows have square holes.
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Managed to get all four sections of the top glued up. A bit laborious, but pretty straightforward. Decided to take a suggestion and use some jatoba for contrast.
The plan was to glue up 4 sections of boards. Then I’d flatten each section before gluing the sections together. The rationale was that it would be easier to flatten each section using the powered jointer and planer than it would be the entire top using hand planes.
There were two problems with this approach, both of whic...

Don’t have many pictures of the before to dig up but I’m sure in my other posts it can be seen.
the shelf portion in this picture i took back out ( it was deeper than the bench top and kept hitting my knees on it) and gave to a neighbor who flipped it upside down and uses it to set his beer on while restoring his late 60s El Camino. It was sitting around originally made for another spot in my basement but i somehow measured wrong and it didn’t fit.
The old bench, which...

After getting my legs glued up, I decided to look at my plan to see how it would fit the likely final leg dimensions. And realized that the 6×6 legs in the SketchUp model would likely end up at 5 1/2” x 5 1/2”. So I spent a couple hours making tweaks. Adjusting the leg dimensions was easy. I also simplified a bunch of the joinery. Used LayOut to make dimensioned drawings for leg joinery.
After all, I have 4 legs glued up and waiting for action.
Was about to start cuttin...

I’ve been planning a workbench build for two years, maybe a bit longer. Started by reading everything I could, followed by some quality SketchUp time. Had a design, changed it. Tweaked it again. Threw the design out and started over. More tweaking followed. And so on…
Settled on a Roubo variant, and ordered Benchcrafted hardware. A year and a half ago.
Complete re-design once again. Did a couple tweaks to that and ordered the lumber. Should be well-acclimated to my shop by n...

So as with a lot of us I don’t get to live in my shop, I put family time in front of it and of coarse work (although id trade that one if I could). Anyway I had sometime in the shop yesterday and decided to grab my auger bit and drill some dog holes. My five year old, lil mini me that she is wanted to help. The auger bit cuts or grabs less after the screw tip comes through bottom, so I let her turn the brace at that point thinking she’d get tired. Nope she cut through the bottom o...

This blog entry is further in the past than the previous one, sharp-sighted will notice that leg vise is not ready yet here. I believe it’s not a big deal, so here we go…...At the very beginning of the project I wanted to build some kind of folding workbench, but as project evolved I rejected this folding approach and decided to build solid yet collapsible bench. Thus I started to figure how to mount benchtop on the base when both were ready.
Here’s what I came up with:...

I’ve been working on this bench for more than a year and am finally almost finished. The base is ash and is from a plan I got from woodstore.net and the top is 2×6 lumber from Home Depot and is loosely based on the Stumpy Nubs 2×6 Roubo bench. The top is 36” x 59” and 5” thick. I made it wider than both of the plans called for because I wanted to use it for assembly. I haven’t had a chance to seal it yet because as soon as the top was flat I started...

Wagon vise was the first vise I built and used intensively during workbench construction.
It worked great from the very beginning, the only thing bothering me was poor steel-on-steel friction conditions just where the pressure applied – between crank and garter plate. The solution came from workbench smackdown thread guys: thrust bearings.
So one day I disassembled my wagon vise and upgraded it with thrust bearings. Plus I did couple of other things: shortened the handle (no nee...

Got sick a little and can’t work in the shop, so it’s time to blog :-)...In total I spent quite a bit time working on leg vise, but to my excuse I had to built most of the parts from scratch except for Jim Ritter’s (aka Boatman53) chain mechanism . I’m more than happy with this chain-driven vise and highly recommend it. Jim, thank you a lot for all your effort to send your kit up here to Russia!...Ok, leg vise implies that there must be something done with the leg to...